123 posts categorized "Refugees"

January 14, 2016

“If the migrants cannot be deported to their home states, we must give them a legal status and enable them to work and live in dignity. We don’t have to turn them into such a terrible problem as the right [wing] has done. Many places in Israel need working hands, from nursing to farming.”

January 10, 2016

In all of 2015, Israel processed only 909 asylum requests out of the thousands of requests it got. Only two were approved – despite the fact that most African asylum seekers qualify as refugees under the international law Israel is supposed to be using to determine their status.

January 08, 2016

The administration of the City of Bnei Brak, Israel demolished a building in the Pardes Katz neighborhood after it found out the building was being used as housing by African asylum seekers. The demolition was reportedly part of an ongoing plan to force Africans out of the haredi city.

December 07, 2015

Anti-refugee bias is strong in the US and Israel. But history shows this type of anti-refugee fear-mongering has very negative consequences – consequences you didn't learn from your rosh yeshiva or Rush Limbaugh.

November 29, 2015

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and a group of other NGOs filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice today asking it to firmly strike down the government’s policy of indefinitely imprisoning African asylum seekers unless they agree to accept so-called “self-deportation” to an unnamed African country that is not their homeland.

November 23, 2015

“The Jewish tradition teaches that we must love the stranger, because we were strangers. The geopolitics are incredibly complex, but the fundamental spiritual teaching is simple: we must provide love and care for those fleeing persecution. Also, I’d like to think that a smiling rabbi being the first Western face a refugee fleeing ISIS sees is one of ISIS’s worst nightmares.”

November 09, 2015

“The court did not give sufficient weight to the evidence presented before it and instead approved a policy based on the a confidential arrangement, which has no parallel in the world. An abundance of evidence presented to the court taught that it leads to serious harm to people who were sent to Rwanda.…While the state guaranteed that those sent to Rwanda would be able to stay there and work, it turns out that they do not receive anything, are placed in an enclosed area and their only choice is to be illegally smuggled to Uganda. The ruling could lead to the indefinite imprisonment of masses of innocent people just because of their fear to go to Rwanda, under conditions in which their status and security is not appropriately guaranteed."

November 06, 2015

88-year-old Mariam and two of her unmarried daughters were allowed to enter Israel under the Law of Return. But Miriam's youngest daughter Gilda, who is in her 50s, and Gilda’s Muslim husband, Khaled; and his three children were not allowed entry, despite the terrible civil war they had fled, because Khaled and his children are muslim and Gilda converted to marry him.

October 19, 2015

Israel Police now say they will "cautiously" investigate the killing of an Eritrean man, Haftom Zarhum, who was gunned down after a terror attack, apparently because he was Black, looked foreign, and was nearby. As he lay bleeding, a mob of Jews kicked, stomped and beat him. Zarhum died several hours later.

September 09, 2015

It's unethical and dishonest, and Rabbi Manis Friedman, the Chabad rabbi doing it, is infamous for (among many other things) comparing child sex abuse to diarrhea and for telling victims of child sex abuse not to tell their significant others about the abuse. Chabad even lied to Australian media and said Friedman wasn't an official Chabad emissary. Chabad got caught in that lie (thanks in large part to FailedMessiah.com). But Friedman still carries the official Chabad mantle. And now he's using it to lure Jews into the Chabad orbit through a near complete and total misrepresentation of history, kabbalah and Jewish law and exploitation of these naîve Jews' desire for a better sex life. When it comes to snatching souls – or, for that matter, synagogue buildings or your money – Chabad has no shame at all.

September 04, 2015

“Europe is being tested as it has not been tested since the second world war … The European Union was created as a way of saying that we recognize human rights, after the catastrophe of two world wars and the Holocaust, and it’s very chilling to see some of these scenarios being re-enacted."

September 02, 2015

Over the past five years, about 200 African asylum seekers living in Israel, most from Ethiopia and Eritrea, were secretly resettled in other Western countries, including the US, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – an unheard of step that essentially classifies Israel as a Third World backwater, taken after Israel refused to honor its international obligations to help these sick, hopeless refugees.

August 26, 2015

The head of Enforcement and Foreign Workers at Israel's Population Authority, Yossi Edelstein, came to Holot to supervise the African asylum seekers release process. “We hope they keep to the restrictions,” he said, referring to the [newly issued government] ban on [these newly-released asylum seekers living in] Tel Aviv and Eilat. When asked why the asylum seekers weren’t receiving help finding housing and work, Edelstein said: “They weren’t born in Tel Aviv.”

August 25, 2015

1,178 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers will be released from the Holot detention-facility-cum-prison today and Wednesday, but few have any idea where they will live or how they will survive after the government issued a new decree that cuts off many of them from their friends, family and communities.

August 20, 2015

8,335 asylum seekers who fled from Sudan and Eritrea to Israel seeking safety were pushed out of Israel over the past two-and-a-half years. But despite Netanyahu government claims that these refugees were going to safe third countries in Africa where they would be welcomed and cared for, more than two-thirds of them actually went back to war-torn Sudan and Eritrea – two countries that are so dangerous international law prohibits deporting undocumented migrants or asylum seekers to them. Some of these asylum seekers were imprisoned and tortured after returning to their home countries while others are missing and their fate is unknown.

August 12, 2015

“We are facing a time bomb, a threat that is bigger than the one from Iran. Filipino women are going to bed with Israeli men and staying here. I’m familiar with this. It’s no less a danger than the infiltrators. The women have learned the system. It’s a demographic catastrophe. I would prefer a million drug addicts to one infiltrator, because the infiltrators have come to swallow us up.”

June 08, 2015

Data from Israel’s Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority shows that 3,165 Sudanese nationals – almost all from the horrifically war-torn Darfur region where slaughter of Christians and African Muslims by Arab tribes was commonplace – filed asylum requests between 2009 and February 2015. None of the asylum-seekers were given refugee status and many were imprisoned.

April 23, 2015

"…No one is demanding that 55,000 African migrants be given full citizenship anytime soon, only that they receive legal status and be allowed to work, to pay taxes, to live in decent homes outside their cramped hovels near the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station and that they be protected from exploitation by rapacious employers.…" But even this is far beyond what Israel is willing to do, and far beyond what the American Jewish community expects Israel to do – and that speaks volumes about the Jewish community's moral failure.

April 22, 2015

Population and Immigration Authority has already confirmed that asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan will now be deported without their consent. Those who refuse to agree to this “voluntary” deportation will be imprisoned at the Saharonim Prison indefinitely. It was this threat that caused the murdered African asylum seekers to leave Israel, and that got them murdered.

April 03, 2015

The Population, Immigration and Border Authority told the approximately 2,000 African asylum seekers who are being illegally detained at the Holot “detention facility” in the desert near Gaza – almost all of who qualify for refugee status under international law – that they will now be deported from Israel to an unnamed African country unless they are determined to be refugees. Israel’s High Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled detention of these asylum seekers at Holot to be illegal, but successive governments headed by Benjamin Netanyahu have skirted those rulings.

March 30, 2015

Five babies of African asylum seekers died in ad hoc daycare centers in South Tel Aviv over the past eight weeks, and dozens more reportedly died in similar unsafe, overcrowded and unsanitary ad hoc centers under similar circumstances over the past two years – all while the government of Israel failed to do anything to protect those children or help.

February 25, 2015

Government statistics just released show that of 3,165 Sudanese asylum applications lodged since 2009, Israel has recognized a grand total of zero. Almost 2,200 of them are still waiting for an answer. Of 2,408 Eritreans who lodged asylum claims, 4 have received positive decisions. Another 1,000 requests have been denied and 1,335 are stuck in limbo awaiting a decision.

January 16, 2015

Temperatures dropped to around zero degrees Celsius, and last week many of the approximately 2,300 African asylum seekers detained in Holot complained that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) had confiscated their personal space heaters. All of the rooms in Holot are unheated and uninsulated, except for a public dining room, a public lounge – and all of the rooms used soley by Israel's prison guards.

January 11, 2015

As snow blanketed much of Israel, African asylum seekers held against their will at the Holot detention facility in the Negev Desert shivered in their beds under piles of clothes to try to ward off the extreme cold made worse after the Israel Prison Service (IPS) confiscated the space heaters and temperatures dropped to freezing.

December 10, 2014

The law allows Israel to detain African asylum seekers – almost every one of them blacks from Eritrea and Southern Sudan – without a trial or judicial hearing for 3 months in closed “detention centers” the rest of the world calls prisons, and then for 20 months in a so-called “open” detention center located in the middle of a barren desert.

November 05, 2014

"…Anyone who has undergone conversion is entitled to acquire citizenship. The State of Israel is dealing with a significant number of illegal residents [almost of whom are African asylum seekers – ed.], and they will do everything to enjoy what the state has to offer, [even convert].”

November 02, 2014

“We must change the Law of Return immediately so it will include only those who are Jewish according to the halakha. Israel can decide to be the third world's welfare state, but as long as that decision has not been taken – it needs to stop allowing non-Jews to make Aliyah."

October 27, 2014

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants has petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice, demanding the release of 138 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers who have been illegally held in Israeli detention facilities for more than two years, despite High Court rulings against such facilities and detention.

October 04, 2014

“There is no asylum-seeker problem in Israel – they are illegal job immigrants,” Netanyahu said, adding that Israel has the right to protect its borders. “We don’t have to open our doors to be swamped by the way other people run their economies."

October 02, 2014

Despite the fact that Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered the government last month to close the Holot detention center within 90 days, the government is still sending African asylum-seekers there against their will.

September 14, 2014

A new report by Human Rights Watch has found that African asylum seekers have been denied fair and timely asylum procedures and have been unlawfully detained as part the effort to illegally force them to leave Israel. The Human Right Watch report also found that Israel is coercing these asylum seekers into leaving for countries that are dangerous and where their lives are at risk – itself a violation of international law.

July 10, 2014

African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv – almost all of whom are legally refugees under international law but who have not been treated as such by Israel – reportedly say they have not received instructions on what to do when missile alert sirens sound, and those African asylum seekers who have been imprisoned in detention centers in the south of the country not far from Gaza say the instructions they were given are unclear and the fortified rooms they are supposed to use are often locked during attacks so they cannot enter them.

June 20, 2014

New research conducted for the Citizens’ Coalition for Electoral Democracy in Uganda (CCEDU) has reportedly found that female circumcision, known more commonly in the West as female genital mutilation (FGM), is prevalent in areas of the country where water resources are lacking and that FGM may have begun as a means of warding off vaginal infections.

May 20, 2014

“The [Border Authority] was apparently relating to one fact that isn’t typical of Swedish citizens – that the appellant is of Eritrean origin. It’s inconceivable that the respondent would discriminate against citizens of the same country solely because of their origin.…It’s hard to understand the logic of the respondents, who apparently thought the appellant would choose to exchange her Swedish citizenship with all its attendant economic benefits for a status of no status in Israel."

April 23, 2014

Writing in the Forward, the Jerusalem Post's opinion editor Seth Frantzman lists some recent and some not so recent examples of Israeli racism. And while his attempt to show American Jews how deeply racist much of Israeli society can be is important, his unusual choice of what to exclude from his article tells much about his grasp of the problem and his evident bias.

April 12, 2014

Israeli activists and African asylum seekers living in Tel Aviv held an alternative Passover seder event Friday outside the Holot detention center in the Negev desert, where 1,800 African asylum seekers are currently being held.

March 17, 2014

“When I saw the people waiting here my heart broke. When I see people who fled their homes and were left with nothing, I cannot stay silent – I was in that situation too, we too were refugees. The Israeli society has a history and that is why we cannot stay indifferent to human suffering; that should be our primary thought. We established a country here to set a moral example."

February 18, 2014

A Chabad rabbi, 31-year-old Shneur Zalman Odze told the members of the right wing populist anti-immigrant UK Independence Part (UKIP) that he will not shake women’s hands due to his religious beliefs, offending many party activists and prompting at least one regional party organizer to resign when Odze was subsequently included on the party’s candidate’s list for for European Parliament.

January 13, 2014

“I’m sorry that I came. My friends who escaped to Canada and the United States have rights, and get treated properly. What do we have here?” he says. “Every day since the stabbing [of my baby daughter], I’m sorry that I came to Israel. There are also good people here, but I’m not considered a person, because of the color of my skin."

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